Lost in Translation

Author’s Note

This is a work of fiction. It includes references to real people and events, which are used to give the fiction a historical reality. In particular, although many of the facts concerning Teilhard de Chardin and Lucile Swan are accurate and the quotations from their letters come directly from published sources, their lives are used fictitiously in this work. Names, characters, and incidents relating to nonhistorical figures are the product of the author’s imagination. Please see the Historical Note for more information.

Material from the following sources has been reprinted by permission:

The Phenomenon of Man, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Copyright 1955 by Editions de Seuil. Copyright © 1959 in the English translation by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., London, and Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc., New York. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

The Phenomenon of Man, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. © Editions de Seuil, 1951. Reprinted by permission.

"As the sun rose over the mountain…" reprinted by permission of Philomel Books from Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes, selected and edited by Robert Wyndham, © 1968 by Robert Wyndham. Brief segments have also been quoted from the following works:

Letters From a Traveller, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Copyright © 1962 in the English translation by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., London, and Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc., New York.

Letters to Léontine Zanta, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in the English translation by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., London, and Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc., New York, 1969.

The Letters of Teilhard de Chardin and Lucile Swan, Thomas M. King and Mary Wood Gilbert, editors. Copyright © 1993 by Mary Wood Gilbert.

Since the inner face of the world is manifest deep within our human consciousness, and there reflects upon itself, it would seem that we have only got to look at ourselves in order to understand the dynamic relationships existing between the within and the without of things at a given point in the universe.

In fact so to do is one of the most difficult of all things.

– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin The Phenomenon of Man